In this age of "alternative facts," a new guardian of truth has emerged: the people behind National Park Service Twitter accounts.

The Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota fired off tweets about climate change on Tuesday amid gag orders levied on the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency that prevent scientists and employees there from using social media and discussing research.

Those gag orders don't apply to the National Park Service, though it's not a stretch to say that they soon might. In fact, as this story was being written, the below tweets were deleted.

We reached out to the Interior Department to ask why the tweets were deleted, but have not yet heard back.

The Interior Department, which encompasses the National Park Service (NPS), was briefly under a gag order of its own after the NPS's main Twitter account retweeted crowd size information about the audience at President Donald Trump's inauguration that indicated the numbers were far from historic.

Someone behind the account later apologized for the tweets, and said the agency initially asked for a social media halt because they wanted to check whether the account had been hacked. Maybe that's true, though it might also have something to do with Trump's obsession with crowd size. Trump and his press secretary have both lied about the size of the president's audience at his inauguration in the days since.

Many observers took the Badlands tweets as a grain of defiance amid an administration that has been no friend to science.

I salute you, Badlands National Park tweeter who is probably going to get fired but is going out in style. https://t.co/LrcH91IOuJ

Other Twitter accounts, such as the ones representing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geological Survey, seem to be tweeting as normal.

UPDATE Jan 25 11:02 AM PT:

National Park Service spokesman Thomas Crosson issued a statement via email to Mashable.

"Several tweets posted on the Badlands National Park's Twitter account [Tuesday] were posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park's account," he wrote. "The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized that their account had been compromised."

The National Park Service also advised all its social media managers to not tweet out "content related to national policy issues," Crosson wrote.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.